Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) recently confirmed that its SiS756 northbridge has already moved into mass production and motherboards using the chip will be available in the first quarter. The company officially announced this northbridge chip in the middle of March and it recently passed PCI-SIG PCI Express (PCIe) compatibility certification.
The SiS756 supports the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Athlon64, Athlon64 FX, Opteron and Sempron processors and offers a PCIe x16 interface for discrete graphics. In combination with the SiS965 southbridge, the solution comes with an integrated SATA 1.0 controller (with RAID functions), Ultra ATA/133 controller (2 channels), PCIe x1 bridge (250MB/s bandwidth in each direction), USB 2.0/1.1 host controller (up to 8 ports), Gigabit Ethernet MAC controller, AC'97 audio interface and V.90 modem support.
The SiS 756 is promised to be pin-to-pin compatible with the forthcoming SiS761. This chip includes integrated graphics and is scheduled for mass production in the first half of next year.
The SiS756 and SiS965 are linked through the proprietary SiS MuTIOL interface, with bandwidth of 1 GB/s. According to Nelson Lee, director of product marketing division in SiS's technical marketing department, the company has no plans to phase out this interface in favor of other non-proprietary bus technologies (like HyperTransport and PCIe). In fact, the company is already developing the next generation of MuTIOL and hopes to bring the technology up to a bandwidth of 2 GB/s next year, said Lee.
_______________
Read More:
digitimes
Dec 23, 2004, 08:02 AM
